For people who like the accessibility of a standard editor: Learn to enjoy it & stop complaining

IMO pico/nano is too simple to actually enjoy and ed is not very user friendly. That leaves vi/vim. If possible, use vim over vi, and if you haven't already, run vimtutor. Take the time to feel comfortable..

Kwrite for the WIN, there is just something about kate that makes me cringe with bloat although I have to admit I use eclipse for almost all of my programing (php and java atm). For the CLI I use nano or pico. I once tried to get into vi or emacs and then I realised that it was pointless I don't have any problems using kwrite

Berengal wrote:Only if they're killer robots. Legos are happy robots. Besides, even if they were killer robots it wouldn't stop me. You can't stop science and all that.

enk wrote:That leaves vi/vim. If possible, use vim over vi, and if you haven't already, run vimtutor. Take the time to feel comfortable..

vi is symlinked to vim on just about every system I've seen. This has led to me taking up the habit of typing "vi" to start it. I would probably be very surprised if I was ever using a system that didn't do this, and was suddenly faced with vi instead of vim.

enk wrote:That leaves vi/vim. If possible, use vim over vi, and if you haven't already, run vimtutor. Take the time to feel comfortable..

vi is symlinked to vim on just about every system I've seen. This has led to me taking up the habit of typing "vi" to start it. I would probably be very surprised if I was ever using a system that didn't do this, and was suddenly faced with vi instead of vim.

We have this server at my university, it's Solaris 9 from 2002. vi is certainly vi and they didn't install vim until I asked them last year (and no symlinkage...). Luckily I'm going to the real CS institute next year.

The default install of FreeBSD has nvi (a vi clone) and not vim; vi is symlinked to nvi and remains so after vim installation. At least that's how it was last time I had a working FreeBSD machine.

Fair enough to me. nvi is what you want sometimes. Like when your IDE controllers go berserk and change how they refer to your disks (possibly because you dropped the laptop so many times that the not-designed-to-be-removable CD drive fell out), so your /usr partition is unavailable and you just need to make some quick changes to your /etc/fstab to get yourself back working again. Typing vi Just Worked (because nvi was in /bin and probably statically linked)

If this happened on my Linux box, where vi is linked to vim, in all its dynamically linked glory, I would have been down to ed. Actually the changes I had to make in that case could have been easily accomplished with a sed one-liner, but it's nice to have visual verification that you're doing it right sometimes.

EDIT: correction. My Linux box is (sadly) running Gentoo, which has nano in /bin, and ldd output indicates it should be able to run without anything from /usr. I am better at ed than nano, though.

One of these days my desk is going to collapse in the middle and all its weight will come down on my knee and tear my new fake ACL. It could be tomorrow. This is my concern.

For those of you who prefer simple editors ("emacs is too weird and heavy", "you can't type in vim"), I'd like call attention to evim, which is vim running in "easy mode". It's an easy to use, widely available and powerful editor.

You use arrow keys and you type to write, just as you'd expect. It's still not as easy as pico/nano, but you get access to all the neat features of vim. And it's just as available as vim, which I'm pretty sure is more widely available than pico/nano/joe/emacs.

My biggest problem is when source control commits open a VI terminal and I blithely hit c-x c-s which of course causes VI to go into Akira mode, and I basically have to run for the emergency fire ax down the hall to kill it before it turns into a giant blob of cyberflesh bent on ingesting Tokyo.

The basic fact is that both emacs and vim have crippling faults. Emacs does some cool things, but decided on elisp as a language. Vim does some cool things, but is nowhere near modifiable enough.

So we are at an impasse.

Until YI, the most recursive editor comes up to snuff. It's written in Haskell (so you have a good language) and is hot-re-compilable (no interpretation! small!) and configurable (in haskell!).Modal (if you want) or not (if you want).

It's like a lovechild of emacs and vim, but without all the suck. (note that development is not yet done, not all of your favorite features may exist)

but it's still a few features short of useable. Mainly it lacks self-documentation. If I had that I could probably try to hack the rest. As it stands, emacs is still the superior Haskell editor, but I look forward to the day YI gets a proper tutorial.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students who are motivated by money: As potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

My biggest problem is when source control commits open a VI terminal and I blithely hit c-x c-s which of course causes VI to go into Akira mode, and I basically have to run for the emergency fire ax down the hall to kill it before it turns into a giant blob of cyberflesh bent on ingesting Tokyo.

get source control to open emacs instead then? whats EDITOR set to in your environment ?

It should be noted that on systems where vi is symlinked to vim, it launches vim in "compatibility mode" (also accessible with :set compatible) which is designed to be vi-compatible - although it isn't entirely.

I tried emacs for a while, didn't much like it. I think it does come down to what someone said about two pages back: emacs is a programmer's text editor/IDE/OS/kitchen sink, whereas vim is great for sysadmins, which is my chosen path. Obviously there's a lot of counterexamples and both can be used for the other. I really prefer vim period. I don't do that whole chording thing.

Sexothermic

I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it. -VoltaireThey said we would never have a black president until Swine Flu. -Gears

Whenever I'm in Windows, notepad is filled with win and god. You can't beat it, don't even try.

For at least a decade, since I first fired up the mini-linux distribution I found that ran linux .98 from a distribution of slackware, a vi clone is almost universally installed by default, so it's stupid to use anything else. I can type 'vi' in BeOS, or macOS, or FreeBSD, or any one of a bunch of different operating systems, and get something I can use. Emacs could be really cool. I don't know, and I don't care, because odds are I'm going to have to use vi to edit something before I can get it -- since I've got to learn it anyway, why not just use vi?

enk wrote:Edit: Let's do a fundraising so hotaru can get a computer fast enough to run vim

i have several computers fast enough to run it, i just prefer not to have to sit and wait for a quarter of a second for my editor to start. it's not a lot of time but it's enough to break my rhythm when i'm working on 3 or 4 things at once

On the *nices:Vi is my favorite, then Pico/Nano. I'm crippled on Emacs, at that point I just do an "echo /dev/tty > file.txt" to try to do anything.

On Windows:EDIT.COM [it's mislabeled, it's really an EXE], the one that's come with every Windows version since 95 [all other versions suck, especially the FreeDOS one, I gave up there, and installed Vi]. Customizable colors, no need to hit the spacebar, ever, and it's a console app. What more could you want? And for doing ASCII art? Amazing. Move the cursor where you want, click there even! It's amazing.

And then maybe Notepad/Metapad. I like ConTEXT as well, but it's too bulky.